the memory of all that

“January 1991: War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation: thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.”

— Adrienne Rich, from What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993)